WRRC Archive

Presentation

The WRRC Programmme helped support the participation of VNC partners to the fourth WLUML Feminist Leadership Institute in Senegal in 2009, which was a two-week long training institute which brought together WHRDs from Asia, Africa, the Middle East and diasporas with sessions on media, human rights, rights within Islam, sexuality, and advocacy in Muslim contexts.

Since the enactment of Indonesia's pornography law No. 44 in 2008, the women’s activists coalition of South Sulawesi rejected the bill and urged the government to withdraw the law. Their legal effort - a judicial review of this pornography act - was rejected by the constitutional court.

The Workshop - one of the activities of the SWG Year 3 Workplan - was for Asian project partners and SWG members. Another Workshop was organized for African project partners and SWG members in December 2011 in Lagos, Nigeria.

The WIPR Working Group participated in the Asia Pacific NGO Forum on Beijing+15 (Oct 22-24 October 2009, Quezon City, Philippines) by producing a position paper “Addressing men-made disasters: how women have been dispossessed of rights to land, food security and livelihood”, which waspresented on its behalf by Roya Rahmani at the Forum.

While the first face-to-face WIPR meeting in June 2009 in Dakar, Senegal, had included only working group members, the second face-to-face meeting included working group members and representatives of eight organisations, which had been selected as project partners. In late 2009, in response to a call for proposals, the proposals of these eight organisations had selected through a rigorous review process, out of a total of sixteen proposals received. A second face-to-face workshop was thus organised to build the capacity of these partners to support the implementation of their projects.

BAOBAB for Women's Human Rights hosted the Sexuality Workshop held for African Partners from December 12-16, 2010 in Lagos, Nigeria. A total of 18 partners including one logistics person were in attendance. The overall workshop objective was to consolidate the projects executed by African Partners under the MDG 3 grant awarded to Women Under Muslim Laws (WLUML) and Institute for Women’s Empowerment (IWE), discuss ways forward and build synergies across different countries implementing the project. The following planned outcomes were achieved from the project:

The Regional Coordination Office for Africa and the Middle East of the Women under Muslim Laws Network (WLUML-RCO/AME) organized a workshop on the topic of sexuality and sexual rights in Rabat, Morocco from May 5-8, 2009. This regional meeting, which examined the issue of “Sexuality and Sexual Rights”, drew some two dozen participants from a wide range of countries, including Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Sudan, Senegal, Nigeria, Egypt, Uganda, RDC Congo, Lebanon and Pakistan.

In 2010-2011, Salmmah Women’s Resource Center in Sudan followed up on their previous year’s project under WRRC on sexual harassment, which had aimed to raise awareness, collect baseline data, inform policy makers of the underlying contributing factors, and suggest examples of measures to adopt for effective remedy.